A modern public terrestrial mobile communication network is based on a cellular architecture, in which location management is a core technology. The location management includes two aspects. One aspect is to trace location of an idle mobile terminal, and the other aspect is to keep service continuity after the location of the mobile terminal changes. The latter is called a handover technology. In an existing cellular network, two levels of location management are usually applied. The level-1 location management occurs in a cell, and the level-2 location management occurs in a Location Area (LA). One location area includes multiple cells. If a location area of an idle mobile terminal changes, the mobile terminal reports its new location information to the network initiatively.
FIG. 1 is a schematic structural diagram of a location area in the prior art. The location area includes multiple cells. Peripheral cells 11 (for example, cells filled with oblique lines in FIG. 1) are border cells (Broader Cell).
With development of the communication technology, cell coverage scope of the cellular network and coverage scope of the location area are smaller and smaller. Besides, with the development of rapid large-capacity vehicles, high-speed group movement becomes an important movement mode of the mobile terminals. When a high-speed vehicle moves from one cell to another, plenty of the mobile terminals need to hand over from one cell to another, which gives rise to a handover of group mobile terminals.
The handover technology of group mobile terminals in the cellular network in the prior art brings the following problems: taking the FIG. 1 as an example, when one high-speed vehicle enters the location area, the mobile terminals on the high-speed vehicle generate handover requests and location update requests. In FIG. 1, two special cells 11a (the cells filled with vertical lines in FIG. 1) exist in the border cells. The high-speed vehicle enters and leaves the location area through the two cells 11a respectively. The high-speed vehicle passes multiple cells 12 (the cells filled with panes) when moving in the location area. When the high-speed vehicle moves from one cell 12 to another cell 12, the mobile terminals in a connected mode on the high-speed vehicle hand over from one cell 12 to another cell 12. Therefore, handover request messages sent by the group mobile terminals are generated, and the handover request messages sent by the group mobile terminals may cause significant impact on access resources of a target cell and increase handover failure rate. When the high-speed vehicle moves from one location area to another location area, the border cells in the destination location area generate not only the handover request messages sent by the group mobile terminals, but also location update request messages sent by the group mobile terminals. The location update request messages sent by the group mobile terminals are much more than the handover request messages, thereby increasing the handover failure rate even more.